Alkibiades, a tale of the Great Athenian War

IN the early morning of a spring day in Greece, under a heaven of such a blue as one can seldom see elsewhere, leaning from a window of one of the noblest houses in Athens, look...

A YEAR and a month have passed away. On a warm June afternoon, escaping from Zopyros, the boy we attempted to describe in the last chapter had wandered by himself a short way ou...

DURING the fifty years which immediately preceded the period at which we now arrive Athens had risen from a level little higher than that of many of her neighbour towns to be th...

THROUGH all that winter, and long after it, the siege of Potidaia lasted. Sokrates showed superhuman power of endurance, keeping his watch by night barefoot amid the ice and sno...

IN the late autumn of 425 B.C., when the keen bright winter was just beginning to give warning that he was coming soon, Alkibiades brought his young bride home to his great hous...

IT was towards the end of May, in the year 423, that Kleon gave his celebrated banquet to his friends. His house was large and sumptuous rather than beautiful. Βάναυσον is the w...

MANY great affairs of state have happened since the events we have just recorded. Kleon, at length carrying out the threat made at his celebrated banquet the year before, put hi...

THE same year which saw his triumph as an orator and a statesman gave Alkibiades an opportunity of another triumph, in Grecian eyes, no less great and wonderful. The first had b...

THE battle of Mantineia was fought, as all men know, in the month of June, 418 years before the Christian era; and, as all men do not know, Alkibiades saw it fought.

WE must now take the reader away from Greece, and ask him to turn his thoughts for a little while to Sicily. If an example were wanted of the effect of intestine quarrel, we nee...

THE fleet was to have been ready to sail by the beginning of the following June. In the meantime each Athenian tried to outdo his neighbour in his eagerness to make the undertak...

THE day after the meeting of the Assembly which has just been described saw another, and a very different, scene enacted in the streets and ports of Athens. The great fleet was...

‘It would give me pain to tell you of the rumours that are flying about among the people, and the number of discordant and inconsistent opinions held about me.’—BOETHIUS.

IT was early in the afternoon of September the twenty-fifth by our reckoning when the _Eros_, following the _Salaminia_, got up to Thurii, an Athenian colony near the site of th...

ON his return to Thurii Alkibiades found Kryptos had indeed gone and taken the _Eros_ with him. So he waited there for news from Athens. It was not long in coming. He heard how,...

CHIOS, the richest of all the rich, luxuriant islands of the Grecian Archipelago, celebrated for the beauty of its women and its wine, rose like a nymph from the waters of the A...

In the pleasant isle of Samos there were many and great misgivings amongst the Athenian generals and the high-born, delicately nurtured, intellectual Greeks who at this crisis w...

AS they drew near Magnesia they were struck with the beauty and splendour of the place, differing so greatly from the magnificence of Athens or any other place they had seen. Th...

‘I fly from pleasure because pleasure has ceased to please. I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others.’—RASSELAS.

THERE was plenty of work to do at Samos all that summer—defences to be made secure, old ships to be repaired and new ones built, military exercises to be gone through day by day...

‘That is Alcibiades. In the flower of his manly prime, in the bloom of his wonderful talents ... there stands the great moral antithesis, the living type of the Athenian charact...

‘The fish swam by the castle wall, And they seemed joyous each and all; The eagle rode the rising blast: Methought he never flew so fast As then to me he seemed to fly; And then...

IT is not pleasant to be shut up in prison for a fortnight, expecting every day that poison, or a dagger, will make that one your last. But even to that the prisoner gets accust...

‘Come, have a care for thine honour, since now this land calls thee saviour for thy former zeal; and never let it be the memory of thy government that we were set upon our feet...

THE friends who had known the strategos in old days thought that he would, for some time at least, enjoy his hard-earned rest, and spend his time in such pursuits as they knew h...

IN the course of this story we have had to watch the hero of it assailed by many temptations. We have seen him give way to some which many of us think we should have overcome, a...

WE must now return to Athens for awhile, and with amazement behold the people there when news of the affair of Notion reached them, and see a piteous spectacle,—one of the most...

‘The grete kyng of Trace; Blak was his berd, and manly was his face. The cercles of his eyen in his heed They gloweden bytwixe yolw and reed, And lyk a griffoun loked he aboute,...

The loss of Alkibiades was soon felt at Athens. Konon, in the spring of 406, through mismanagement, lost thirty ships in an action against the Lakedaimonians near Lesbos. He ret...

SO ended the great Athenian war. It had been a duel between the two great states, not a war of the Peloponnesos. The Peloponnesos, with the exception of Laconia and one or two a...

THE people soon repented of their conduct to Alkibiades. Not long after they drove him away, when Konon was beaten near Mytilene, we begin to hear the murmur growing more distin...

THREE months before the departure of Alkibiades from the court of Pharnabazos, Kritias had sent secret messages to Lysandros warning him of the growing feeling of regret among t...